# shotgun house

> English word · Noun

## Definitions
1. A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s.

## Etymology
* New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.
* Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term "to-gun", meaning "place of assembly", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/shotgun-house